Pencil-style drawing of a fine-line botanical tattoo design with a curling vine, a pocket watch, a key and the words Life is what you make of it, shown on a pale pink background.

Vine, pocket watch and key design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a climbing vine with buds and small flowers rising from a fancy-edged pocket watch, with a chain and key hanging below. The words Life is what you make of it appear in a small script beneath the watch, with a tiny butterfly beside them. The fine grey linework and light shading sit on a soft pink background, with the design placed toward the lower left of the frame.

Botanical Lettering Vine Pocket watch Key Flower Bud Butterfly Script Chain Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The waistcoat is still on its hanger when you find the watch, a silver thing with scrolled edges that has stopped at ten past four. Aunt Maud is shouting from the kitchen that the florist has sent carnations when she ordered roses, and you stand in the spare room with the case open on your palm, reading the small curling numerals as if they might explain themselves. Taped inside the lid is a key on a loop of old chain, and a scrap of paper in pencil: Life is what you make of it. Your grandfather was never cheerful on paper in his life.

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You take it down the garden, past the wall where the honeysuckle has run wild over the bolted gate. The key turns with a dry click. The watch ticks once, hesitates, then begins again, and you laugh out loud at the sound, because it is ridiculous how much you wanted it to work. A small brown butterfly lifts from the wall and settles on the gatepost beside you, as if it has been waiting for the same thing.

Your bride finds you there twenty minutes later, still holding the watch, with the church car pulling into the lane and the dress half-buttoned at the back. She asks what time it is. You tell her it is ten past four, which is wrong, and then you tell her it is probably close enough. She takes the chain from your fingers and loops it twice around your wrist, and the two of you walk back up the path together, late for the rest of your lives.